Sir, Little did I think that when I pulled up at a set of city traffic lights some time ago, a rear window car sticker reading "Dammit isn't God's second name" in front of me would open up a new avenue of approach to humour's religious dimension.
In the light of the utter unlabelability of our awesome Creator (in a real sense, He has no name at all, not to talk of a second one!) suggested by the sticker, it seems to me, as I asked myself where does the humour fit. in, that, in a world where so much high sounding vocabulary often blurs one's sense of wonder at the ordinary by overemphasising the importance of the extraordinary, a goodly, godly quota of apparent nonsense can be enriching. Balancing our labelling of reality it helps us to keep things in their proper perspective in that it questions, as it were, our taking things for granted, matter of fact way of looking at our environment.
Ordinarily, we like to make our world as rational and sensible as possible in forming long hallowed by usage connections' between things - i.e., linking kings' with thrones and not with cabbages, or Timbuktu with remote, backward places and not with the magical mystique of Rome, the Eternal City, etc., whereas we might be better occupied in cultivating the "Walrus" approach in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. This arctic mammal sees fit to talk of shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, kings, why the sea is boiling hot, etc. Similarly, for example, G.K. Chesterton was "excited and intoxicated" by the "startling wetness of water, the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness, of mud" - i.e., the grand extravagance and interconnectedness of creation.
It has been wisely said that God laughed as He created the universe and that such laughter - beyond meaning - brings meaning to existence like the matchless smile of a child. - Yours, etc.,
Beach Park, Laytown,
Co Meath.